UTC Website Projects

and CMS migration

Sprinting to Go Live

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The finish line has been set for months.

The crowd grows anxious as the race date nears.

The race organizers wait with anticipation as the coach assures them everything is moving ahead as planned.

The racers have trained, trained and trained some more. They’ve met hurdles that seemed far too high. But through perseverance and dedication, they are nearing the starting line.

I’m not referring to a UTC Mocs Track and Field event but the analogy works in this case. I’m talking about the pending go live of the UTC website as we start the migration from OUCampus to Drupal 8.5. By the end of August, we will have content live in the Acquia Cloud developed in Drupal.

This is no small feat.

Since late April, the Web team of Chris Gilligan and Mike Flores has been planning their work in a series of ‘sprints’ in order to stay focused and on task to meet the August goal. The term ‘sprint’ is often used in software project management circles as “a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work.”

The two-week sprints include configuration management (reviewing all the settings to move code from place to place in an organized and efficient manor), content type development, architecture refinement, testing and deployment, and user experience development. Our team is guided by information obtained from Acquia and the larger Drupal community. And, it’s been using tools like Jira and Confluence to capture tasks, meeting notes and to-do lists. For more on sprints in software development, visit the Atlassian Coach.

While the rest of the Web team has focused on the Website Refresh project, Mike and Chris have devoted their time to the development of a content management system that will be modern, clean and ready for the long race.

Stay tuned in coming weeks as we anticipate go live and cheer on the team as they ably sprint to the finish line.

The Fine Art of Following Up

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Nobody likes to be nagged. Whether it comes from your mom, your spouse, or your boss, it may have more to say about the nagger than the naggie.

To be a good project manager, one must find ways of following up that yield results over resentment. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, a role of a project manager is to make sure a project completes on time, at or under budget and within scope. I also like to add a fourth element and that’s to maintain a positive, productive working relationship with all the stakeholders on a project. I’m happy if no one dies or is incarcerated as a result of a project I’ve managed!

Projects can easily get off track. Especially during summer, project participants go on vacation, take days off for holidays or generally are away from the office. Yet the project remains. So it is with our Website Refresh project.

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Be Our Guest

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If you’ve been to anything Disney, you know there’s an entire culture around visitors being treated as guests.  If you’ve shopped at Nordstrom’s or Williams-Sonoma, both hallmarks of customer service, the focus on understanding customers and making spaces inviting is paramount to what they do.  You don’t just buy a product, you have an overall experience.

With that thought in mind, the Web team is implementing a more robust way to collect your issues and requests.

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A Letter from Camp

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UTC was a Bronze sponsor of Drupal Camp Chattanooga held on June 7-8 at Chattanooga State Community College.  Chèrie Whipple, Chris Gilligan and Mike Flores attended to represent UTC.

This is my third Drupal specific camp having attended Baltimore’s Drupal Camp and Washington D.C.’s DrupalGovCon. The Chattanooga Drupal Users Group (CHADUG), headed up by Lee Walker of Code Journeyman, meets monthly. Meeting other Drupal users and hearing their stories, particularly how Drupal changed their career lives, has been eye opening and encouraging. [Read more…]

Tell Me a Story, Paint Me a Picture

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Why do you search the internet?

Maybe you’re looking for information, knowledge, news of the day. Maybe you have a goal in mind and need to find a specific answer to a question. For those who visit our UTC website, it could be to find out admissions requirements, program information in a specific college or where to pay a parking fine.

When we begin to consider who visits our website and why, the volume of people and reasons can become daunting. Between Jan. 1, 2018, and today, we’ve had 3,767,325 visits to the UTC.edu website homepage alone according to our Siteimprove analytics. That’s right—almost 4 million visits. And what brings them?

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April Showers Bring May Milestones

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Our April showers came in the way of website refresh “go-lives” with eight departments giving the green light to push their sites to production. April was, by far, our busiest month between intake meetings, site reviews and final edits.

As of the last day of April, we have managed to refresh/review 58 departmental or group sites (some with multiple subsites).

We’ve also passed the halfway point in terms of refreshed content and are sitting at 60 percent completed on the website refresh meter. How does that translate in page numbers, you ask? It puts us past the 2,500-page mark! [Read more…]

Spring Cleaning Sparks Joy

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I dedicate this post to Donny Behneman as my latest mantra has become “Does this webpage spark joy?” Or a variation, “Does this PDF spark joy?” Or “Does this photo spark joy?”

As we work our way through the UTC website, one topic in each intake meeting has to do with a review of pages that can potentially be deleted. Old, outdated content contributes, in large part, to the refresh effort. Schedules from 2014, a PDF form from 2011, a photo of a student who has long since graduated all come to light during the refresh process.

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Let’s Go To Camp

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Remember the summer days when time was spent in the great outdoors chasing friends through the woods and discovering new worlds? Or perhaps, summer camp might have been classes at a museum filled with art or at the zoo tending to the elephants. Camps and campers typically equate to fun, summertime activity.

June 7 and 8 will provide an opportunity to attend another type of camp…”Drupal Camp.” Rather than spending time in the great outdoors, the local Drupal community will set up camp at Chattanooga State to share in the adventures of using, programming and learning about all things Drupal.

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Why Drupal? Why Not?

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I’ve been working on web projects for nearly a decade. I enjoy crafting solutions and, thankfully, my work over the years has steered me towards providing technological answers. What I’ve learned is that Drupal is the defacto content management system/framework for many public sector organizations and entities.

This makes sense because groups in the public sector often have very unique organizational qualities, which requires a product suite that can complement those complexities. Drupal is both pliable and opinionated; you may build what you need but you have to do it the Drupal way. The following are snippets of research I’ve done regarding Drupal and why it’s a great solution for UTC. [Read more…]

Time Marches On

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How do we predict how long it will take to <fill in the blank>? When it comes to initiatives or activities that have been done before, experience plays a pivotal role in determining outcome. On the other hand, luck may play just as much of a role in the end.

I’ve managed dozens and dozens of projects over the years. Based on my years of experience, I should be able to more or less accurately predict a project’s timeline. I also know that every project is different and, while I’m pretty good at identifying risk factors at the start of the project, there will always be something that comes up that no one thought of before. A bit like Murphy’s Law, but we’ll call it Whipple’s Hypothesis for now.

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